Melanie choked back the wail of misery and tears that threatened to burst from her. He was her father, and she loved him dearly. But she couldn’t, wouldn’t let him lose this ranch. If he was thinking straight, he would say she was right. As she saw it, it was her job to do what had to be done until this craziness that had a hold of him turned him loose.
“Or else what?” she demanded, keeping her voice as hard and steady as she could. “Or else what, Daddy?”
“You don’t understand,” he said earnestly. “I need cash, and I need it now. Just five grand, that’s all, I swear.”
“We don’t have it to spare,” she protested. “You can see that for yourself. The ranch can’t afford any more of your gambling debts.”
“I swear,” he said, “this is the last time, baby girl, the last time. I’ll never gamble again.”
“How many times have you said that? How many times have I fallen for it? The last time, I let you talk me into selling a prized bull, and now, here we are again. We’ve got only one prized bull left, and we’re not selling him. If we sell Big Angus, we’re finished. If we sell off part of the herd, we’ll lose money—prices are way down right now. Even without this, we’re looking at maybe not being able to make the balloon payment next year. With this, we’re bankrupt, unless we want to sell land. Is that what you want us to do? Sell part of our land?”
“Come on,” he protested. “It can’t be that bad.”
“Can’t it? Look at these credit card bills from Mama’s latest spree. Look at them. If we don’t pay them, our credit is screwed.”
He glanced irritably at the statement in his hand. Then his eyes widened as the figures jumped out at him. “Jeez, Louise, how could she have charged that much?”
“I don’t know, but now you see what I mean. We can’t pay it off this month.” He obviously hadn’t noticed that the largest charge was to a clinic. Melanie started to point it out, so he would know her mother was sick or hurt, but she decided not to. She didn’t know for sure what was wrong with her mother. If it had been anything terrible, Aunt Karen would have called. Right now her dad was upset and under a great deal of stress. She would wait until she knew something definite about her mother before she told him.
“We’re going to have to make payments and pay sky-high interest,” she said, “and winter’s coming on, which means we’re going to have a nice fat heating bill every month.”
“I can’t worry about things that haven’t happened yet,” he said. “If I don’t pay off Bruno by tomorrow they’ll drill holes in my kneecaps—or worse—and that’s the God’s honest truth.”
Melanie shook her head at his exaggeration. “No problem. We’ve still got medical insurance to cover that.”
“You think I’m joking?” he cried.
“I think that if you take five thousand dollars out of our account, medical insurance will be one of the first things to go. Then it’ll be the car insurance, the house insurance. Are you getting the picture yet? We spend an extra five thousand right now, we might as well hang it up, because we’ll be finished.”
“Finished is right.” He swore. “If I don’t pay him off I’ll be finished.”
Melanie did her best to ignore the knot in her stomach. Tough love, she was learning, was at least as hard on the person dispensing it as on the recipient. This was killing her.
“You’ll just have to find some other way to do it,” she said. “We don’t have the money. I won’t let your gambling bankrupt this ranch. I hope you understand.”
“Understand?” he cried. “I’m supposed to understand why my own flesh and blood is so selfish and tightfisted that she’d rather throw her own father to the wolves than turn loose of a few dollars?”
“Five thousand is not a few, and I’m not responsible for your gambling. You are. You did it, you fix it.”
“How? You’ve cut me off from my own money.”
“Your money? What am I? Chopped liver? A hired hand? It was your idea to make me a partner. It was you and Mama together who decided I should have fifty percent while the two of you had a quarter each. You gave me the responsibility of keeping the PR solvent, and that’s what I’m doing.”
His face turned from flushed to gray and back again. “My own daughter.” He shook his head and turned toward the door. “It’s not natural. It’s just not natural.”
“Daddy?”
He stopped just beyond the doorway but did not turn back. “I’m going out. I don’t know when I’ll be back. A day or two maybe.”
Melanie swallowed hard. Her vision blurred. “Daddy?”
He kept walking. A moment later she heard the back door shut. His pickup started up, and he was gone.
“Oh, Daddy.” She turned around and kicked the ottoman in front of the easy chair next to the desk. “Dammit.”
“Was that your dad who just left?”
At the sound of Caleb’s voice from the doorway Melanie bit back a groan. “Yes.”
She heard him move closer. “He didn’t stay long,” he said. “Is he coming back?”
Melanie found that she couldn’t turn around. Couldn’t face her best friend. She hated family discord, hated even more that she had told Caleb about her father’s gambling, their financial troubles. It was too embarrassing. No, she couldn’t turn around.
But she wanted to. Wanted to turn around and lean on him, let him prop her up until she felt steady enough to cope again. She wanted it so much that she steeled herself against even looking at him.
“He said he’d be gone a day or two.”
“Mel?” He put a hand on her shoulder. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah. Fine. Listen…” She forced herself to turn and smile. “Thanks for offering to stick around and help, but I’ll be fine. You can go on home.” And she could take a run out to the hay field and pound on a bale or two. If she didn’t get to hit something, and soon, she was going to explode. Or cry. Neither, as far as she was concerned, was acceptable in front of Caleb.
“We’ve already had this argument, and you lost. I’m staying.”
On the other hand, she thought, there were an awful lot of bales to be loaded and stored in the hay barn. Twenty acres’ worth. It was normally a three-person job. With Caleb’s help, the two of them should be able to get the work done today. Alone it would take her two or three days, if she didn’t kill herself in the process. It was a nasty, dirty job, almost as bad as cutting the hay in the first place, with bits of hay finding their way inside a person’s clothes and making you itch to high heaven.
“All right.” She gave him a nod. “But we’re loading and hauling hay and there’s only two of us, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Fair enough.”
Caleb was just glad she’d given in, since he’d had no intention of leaving her alone to fend for herself. He was only sorry he hadn’t caught Ralph before the man had disappeared again. That man needed his butt kicked.
Chapter Four
Caleb and Melanie had worked together many times over the years, helping out at each other’s ranch, or on someone else’s ranch. They worked together now with few words, as few were necessary. Each knew what needed to be done.
They started in the kitchen, making lunch to take with them. They pulled everything they wanted from the refrigerator and spread it on the table, then walked around it building sandwiches. A regular assembly line of sandwich production. They had bread, mustard and mayonnaise, lettuce and tomatoes and sliced cheese. Roast beef and bologna, peanut butter and jelly.
“You got enough mayo there?”
Caleb looked up from where he was spreading mayonnaise on a slice of bread. “I like mayo.”
“I do, too, but I still want to taste the meat when I bite in.”
“Who’s doing this, you or me?”
“You, but I have to eat it.”
“Wimp.” He scraped a thick layer of mayo from the slice before him. “Is that better?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
; “And don’t skimp on the peanut butter.”
“I’m not,” she protested.
“Are too.”
She slathered it on as thick as she could. “Better?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“The fine art of compromise,” she said.
With half a dozen sandwiches stacked on the table, Melanie turned back toward the refrigerator and found Caleb doing the same. He reached the door first and pulled it open. He went for the apples while she retrieved two bananas.
Melanie stepped to the pantry and tossed him a roll of plastic wrap for the sandwiches. While he wrapped, she found a big bag of potato chips to add to their lunch. As he wrapped the last sandwich she hauled out the small cooler from the floor of the pantry and they started piling everything in, except the bag of chips, which wouldn’t fit. They packed a second cooler with ice and cans of soft drinks, and grabbed two tall plastic tumblers for drinking water from the jug on the truck.
On their way out the door Melanie grabbed her old leather work gloves and a ball cap to keep her hair from blowing in her face.
“Do you need anything?” she asked him.
“Gloves and hat in my rig.”
While he retrieved those items she carried the coolers and chips to the big equipment shed. She set her load down on a bench and opened the wide doors. “Hello, Sister.”
Caleb was just coming up behind her and laughed. “I’d forgotten you call that old truck Sister.”
“Old being the operative word. Daddy brought her home brand spanking new about three years before I was born. Which is how she came to be his first baby. That makes her my sister.”
The old truck had been manufactured specifically for hauling hay. Basically, it was a wooden bed, twenty-five-feet long by eight-and-a-half wide, on wheels. The engine, instead of being under a hood in the front, was mounted dead center beneath the bed, mere inches above the ground. Woe be unto the driver who hit a deep hole or rut.
Been there, done that, Melanie thought. Still had the memory of her daddy’s cussing to prove it.
Rather than a cab like on a regular truck or pickup, Sister had a driver’s station on the left front corner of the bed, complete with seat, steering wheel, gearshift, pedals, and control panel. When Melanie was a baby her dad built an enclosure—only a cover, really, with open sides—to offer a modicum of shade and protection for the driver. He had also mounted a large, insulated water jug, which had to be replaced every five years or so, as the sun and weather broke it down, on the right front corner of the bed. It made a handy passenger seat.
When Melanie had started driving the truck for her dad she’d barely been twelve. Her mother had insisted that Ralph install a seat belt for her. The belt was still there.
Whoever sat on the water jug, however, was on his own.
A loading conveyor extended off the front of the truck, with another conveyor running down the middle of the truck bed. As the truck was driven through the field, one bale at a time would be scooped up by the front conveyor, carried up to the second conveyor, which took it down the bed toward the rear guard that kept it from falling off the back.
Ordinarily two people worked together picking the bales off the second belt and stacking them on the bed, from back to front, until the load was full. The truck could carry one-hundred-fifty square bales of approximately sixty-five pounds each. Nine-thousand-seven-hundred and fifty pounds of dry grass.
Today, instead of one to drive and two to do the toting and stacking, there would be one to drive, one to stack. And it would probably take them two loads to clear the field. Scoop it up, stack it, haul it to the hay barn, unload it, restack it. Go back to the field and do it all again. Melanie would make sure they traded off several times. No way was she going to have Caleb doing all that work himself. Especially after she had clobbered him in the shoulder that morning.
While Caleb rinsed and filled the big water jug on the truck Melanie got the toolbox from the shed and slid it in behind the driver’s seat. They checked the gas tank, found it full, and Melanie climbed into the driver’s seat.
Caleb frowned.
“What?” she asked, her lips twitching.
“I thought I’d drive,” Caleb said.
“Did you, now? And why is that?”
He bit the inside of his jaw. “Habit? Never mind.”
“You offered to help,” she told him. “Tell me I’m not going to be butting up against your he-man ego all day.”
His eyes widened. “My what? I don’t have a he-man ego. Whatever the hell that is. When have I ever tried to stop you from doing anything you wanted to do?”
“How about that time I wanted to drive Jerry MacKenzie’s motorcycle in high school? You had long since graduated. Just what were you doing in the school parking lot that day?”
“I was saving your hide. That motorcycle was a death trap, and you weren’t even going to wear a helmet.”
“I suppose you wear a helmet when you ride a horse, which is a darn sight more unpredictable than a motorcycle.”
“A horse doesn’t have anywhere near the torque that a Harley does.”
“Did you ever ride a Harley?” she asked pointedly.
“We’re not talking about me.”
“Oh, yeah, the old double standard.”
“You were a seventeen-year-old kid.”
She started the truck and put it in gear. “Don’t you mean girl?”
“If the shoe fits, Cinderella.”
“Oh, ugh.”
“What? I thought girls liked Cinderella.”
“Sure.” She headed for the first of several gates they would have to open to get through, then close behind them to keep cattle and horses in their pastures. On horseback, gates could be fun, a challenge. You leaned down from the saddle without dismounting and opened a gate, rode through, then closed and latched it behind you. No big deal. At least not the first seven hundred times you did it. After that it was just a necessary nuisance.
In a vehicle it was a royal pain in the tush, especially if you were alone. Drive up, stop, get out, push the gate all the way open and make sure it doesn’t swing shut. Drive through, stop, get out, walk back to the gate, realize you didn’t drive through far enough to close the gate, get back in and pull forward, get out and walk back, close and latch the gate, walk back to the truck. A pain in the tush.
“Cinderella was a great role model for little girls,” she informed him. “She got her heart’s desire not by having to work for it, but by having small feet. Gives every little girl something worthwhile to strive for, don’t you think? Teaches a valuable lesson about life.”
He scrunched up his face. “Small feet?”
“Forget it.” She pulled to a stop. “Passenger gets the gates.”
He scowled. “That’s why you wanted to drive.”
“Of course.”
She watched as he got out and walked to the gate. Sauntered was more like it, with a cute little bobble and wave from the leather work gloves, the fingers of which were sticking out of his right hip pocket.
Hello, gloves.
Hello, nice butt.
She blinked and found him standing there holding the gate open, a puzzled look on his face as he stared back at her.
Oops. Caught, she thought. Better keep her mind on the business at hand. Which meant keeping her mind off Caleb, which was going to be hard to do, since they were going to be joined at the hip, so to speak, all day.
She drove through the open gate and idled, waiting while Caleb closed the gate and climbed back onto the water jug he was using as a seat. They repeated the process three more times before reaching the far hay field.
The sky was a clear, cloudless blue. The angle of light and shadow where the woods met the field spoke of fall. The breeze carried that sweet, pungent perfume of twenty acres of freshly cut alfalfa.
Melanie scanned the field, then looked at Caleb.
“I’m betting we can get all this stored in the hay barn before dark,” h
e said.
“How’s your shoulder?” she asked.
“It’s fine.” He stood up and tugged on his gloves. “Just drive. I’ll stack.”
“I can stack bales,” she said.
“I’m sure you can. But you wanted to drive.”
“All right,” she said. “But I’ll spell you.”
“We’ll see.”
Melanie drove the big lumbering truck straight and slowly down each row of bales, aiming the end of the loader at each next bale. The conveyor belt carried the bale back to the truck bed where Caleb added it to the growing stack.
The day was warm for October. Mother Nature decided to give them a late dose of summer and pushed the temperature up into the mid eighties, which wasn’t necessarily hot, unless your body protested that, Hey, it’s October already, cool it down some, will ya? The heat, Melanie realized, was both a curse and a blessing. A curse because lifting and stacking bales was hot, heavy work even in cool weather; now it made the sweat roll. A blessing because the warmth had Caleb taking off his shirt before they made it to the second row. The T-shirt he wore beneath it hugged every curve and dip and bulge in his muscled shoulders and torso.
Nice, she thought. Very, very nice.
When Melanie made the turn at the end of the fourth row she had just enough time to notice that one of the old wooden fence posts was down and the wires sagging when the loading conveyor jerked and let out a squeal, then made a hideous grinding noise before it stopped altogether. Melanie shut it down immediately then killed the truck engine. The acrid stench of burning rubber stung her nostrils.
She jumped left off the truck; Caleb leaped off the right side. They met on opposite sides of the loading conveyor.
“If we can’t fix this thing,” Melanie muttered, “Daddy’s going to have my head on a platter.” Heaven knew she was already in the running for his least favorite person of the year after this morning. “I smelled burning rubber.”
“Me, too.” Caleb knelt at the front end of the loader.
The Other Brother Page 7